of the street: where it continued, across, there were no longer tall old camphorwoods lining it; the parking was bare. The houses were a little newer, a little cleaner: they gave way to solid blocks of smallish apartment buildings, and all this again was settled middle-class, and again the faces in the street black and brown.
At the next intersection, he caught the light and sat waiting for it, staring absently at the wooden bench beside the bus-stop sign on the near left corner. Its back bore a faded admonition to Rely on J. Atwood and Son, Morticians, for a Dignified Funeral. There, that night, Carol Brooks had got off the bus on her way home from work, and some time later started down Tappan Street. She had had only three blocks to walk, but she had met- something-on the way, and so she hadn’t got home… The car behind honked at him angrily; the light had changed.
Across the intersection, he idled along another block and a half, slid gently into the curb and took his time over lighting a cigarette. Three single-family houses from the corner, there sat two duplexes, frame bungalows just alike, one white and one yellow. They were, or had been, owned by the widowed Mrs. Shadwell who lived in one side of the yellow one. On that September night the left-hand side of the white one had been empty of tenants, the tenants in the other side had been out at a wedding reception, the tenants in the left side of the yellow duplex had been giving a barbecue supper in their back yard, and Mrs. Shadwell, who was deaf, had taken off her hearing aid. So just what had happened along here, as Carol Brooks came by, wasn’t very clear; if she’d been accosted, exchanged any talk or argument with her killer, had warning of attack and called for help, there’d been no one to hear. She’d been found just about halfway between the walks leading to the two front doors of the white duplex, at twenty minutes past nine, by a dog-walker from the next block: she had then been dead for between thirty minutes and an hour.
It occurred to Mendoza that he was simply wasting time in the vague superstitious hope that the cosmic powers would tap his shoulder and drop that extra ace into his lap. He tossed his cigarette out the window, which was now by law a misdemeanor carrying a fifty-dollar fine, and drove on a block and a half: glanced at the neat white frame bungalow where Carol Brooks had lived, and turned left at the next corner. This was a secondary business street, and it marked one of the boundaries: that side Negro, this side white. The streets deteriorated sharply on the white side, he knew, lined with old apartment buildings only just not describable as tenements. He turned left again and wandered back parallel to Tappan, turned again and then again and came to the corner where the bus stopped, past the two duplexes, and drew into the curb in front of the bungalow numbered 2214.
A woman came up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, turned in at the white house, hesitated and glanced at the car, and turned back toward it. Mendoza got out and took off his hat. 'Mrs. Demarest. I wondered if you still lived here.'
'Why, where else would I be?' She was a tall, slim, straight-backed woman, and had once perhaps been beautiful: the bones of beauty were still there, in her smooth high forehead, delicate regular features, small mouth. Her skin was the color of well-creamed coffee. She was neat, even almost smart, in tailored navy-blue dress and coat, small gold earrings. She might be seventy, she might be older, but age had touched her lightly; her voice was firm, her eyes intelligent. 'It’s Mr. Mendoza,' she said. 'Or I should say ‘Lieutenant.’ You know, if I was a superstitious woman, Lieutenant, I’d say there’s more in it than meets the eye, you turning up. Did you want to see me about something?'
'I don’t know. There’s been another,' he said abruptly. 'I think the same one.'
'Another colored girl?' she asked calmly.
'No. And miles away, over on Commerce Street.'
'That one,' she said, nodding. 'I think you’d best come in, and I’ll tell you. It’s nothing much, though it’s queer-but it’s something you didn’t hear about before, you see. At first I thought I might write you a letter about it, and then I said to myself'-they were halfway up the walk to the house, and he’d taken the brown-paper bag of groceries from her-'I thought, it’s not important, I’d best not trouble you. But as you’re here, you might as well hear about it.' She had been away from Bermuda half her life, but her tongue still carried the flavor, the broad A’s, the interchange of V’s and W’s, the clipped British vowels. She unlocked the front door and they went into the living- room he remembered, furniture old but originally good and well cared for. 'If you’ll just fetch that right back to the kitchen, Lieutenant-you’ll have a cup of coffee with me, we might as well be comfortable and it’s always hot on the back of the stove. Sit down, I’ll just tend to the Duke here and then be with you.'
The cat surveying him with cold curiosity from the hallway door was a large black neutered tom; he established himself on the kitchen chair opposite Mendoza and continued to stare. 'I didn’t remember he was the Duke,' said Mendoza.
'The Duke of Wellington really, because he always thought so almighty high of himself, you know. We got him Carol’s second year in high, and she was doing history about it then. Cats, they’re like olives, seem like-either you’re crazy about them or you just can’t abide them. I remembered you like them. It’s why I was out, after his evaporated milk. Fresh he won’t look at, and the evaporated he lets set just so long till it’s thick the way he fancies it. You see now, he knows I’ve just poured it, he won’t go near. You take milk or sugar?-well, I always take it black too, you get the flavor.'
She set the filled cups on the table and sat in the chair across from him. 'You’ll have missed your granddaughter,' he said. It was another absurd superstitious feeling, that if he asked, brought her to the point, it would indeed be nothing at all.
'Well, I do, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t seem right that there the Duke should be sitting alive, and her gone. It’d be something to believe in some kind of religion, think there was a God Who’d some reason, some plan. I never came to it somehow, but maybe there is. I’ve had two husbands and raised six children, and luckier than most in all of them-and you could say I’ve worked hard. It was a grief to lose my youngest son, that was Caro1’s dad, but I had to figure I’d five left, and the other grandchildren too. Take it all in all, there’s been more good than bad-and what you can’t change, you’d best learn to live with content. I enjoy life still, and I don’t want to die while I’ve still my health and my mind, but you know, Lieutenant, I won’t be too sorry in way when the time comes, because I must say I am that curious about the afterward part.'
'It’s a point of view,' he agreed amusedly. 'So am I now and then, but I’d rather be curious than dead.'
She laughed, with a fine gleam of even white teeth. 'Ah, you’re lucky, you’re half my age! But I said I’d something to tell you. It’s just a queer sort of thing, maybe doesn’t mean much.' She sipped and put down her cup. 'Maybe you’ll remember that that night when Carol was killed, I told you I hadn’t been too worried about her being late home, because sl1e’d said something about shopping along Hawke Street, that’d be when she got off the bus. It was a Monday night, and all the stores along there, they stay open till nine Mondays and Fridays. There’s a few nice little stores, and it’s handy-not so crowded as downtown, and most everything you’d want, drugstore and Woolworth’s, besides a Hartners’, and a shoe store and a couple of nice independent dress shops, and Mr. Grant at the stationery-and-card place J even keeps a little circulating library-and then there’s Mrs. Breen’s.'
He remembered the name vaguely; after a moment he said, 'The woman who had a stroke.'
'That’s right. She’s had that little shop a long while, and sometimes you find things there that’re, you know, unusual, different from the big stores. You mightn’t remember, no reason you should, but on the one side she’s got giftware as they call it-china figures and fancy ash trays and vases and such-and on the other she’s got babies’ and children’s things. Real nice things, with handwork on them, the clothes, and reasonable too. You’ll remember that your men asked around in all the shops if Carol had been in that night, to get some idea of the time and all. And that was the very night Mrs. Breen had a stroke, so you couldn’t ask her if Carol’d been in there, and it didn’t seem important because you found out that she’d been in the drugstore and a couple of other places.'
'Yes-nothing unusual anywhere, no one speaking to her, and she didn’t mention anything out of the way to the clerks who waited on her.'
'That’s so. It didn’t seem as if Mrs. Breen could’ve told any more. She was alone in her place, you know, and all right as could be when her daughter come at nine or a bit before, to help her close up and drive her home. It was while they were locking up she had her stroke, poor thing, and they took her off to hospital and she’s been a long while getting back on her feet. Well, Lieutenant-let me hot up your coffee-what I’m getting to is this. It went out of my mind at the time, and when I thought of it, I hadn’t the heart to bother about it, didn’t seem important somehow-and Mrs. Breen was still in the hospital and her daughter’d closed up the shop. It’d have meant asking her, Mrs. Robbins I mean, to go all through the accounts and so on, and with her so worried and living clear the other side of town too, I just let it go.'
'You thought Carol had been in and bought something there?'
'It was for Linda Sue,' she said, and the troubled look in her eyes faded momentarily. 'My first great-
